That the human race is perfectible; that it progresses towards a higher and higher level; that its wealth is increasing and becoming more equalized; that its ideas are being enlarged and purified; that its errors, and the oppressions which these errors support, are disappearing; that its knowledge shines with brighter and brighter effulgence; that its morality is improving; that it is learning, by reason or by experience, in the domain of responsibility, the art of earning a constantly larger amount of recompense, and a constantly smaller amount of chastisement; that, consequently, evil is continually lessening, and good continually increasing;—these are conclusions which it is impossible to doubt when we scrutinize the nature of man and that intelligent principle, which is his essence, which was breathed into him with the breath of life, and warrants the scriptural declaration that man is made in the image of God.

We know too well that man is not a perfect being. Were he perfect, he would not reflect a vague resemblance of God; he would be God himself. He is imperfect, then,—subject to error and to suffering,—but, on the other hand, were he stationary, what title could he have to claim the unspeakable privilege of bearing in himself the image of a perfect being?

Moreover, if intelligence, which is the faculty of comparing, of judging, of rectifying errors, of learning, does not constitute individual perfectibility, what can constitute it?

And if the union of all individual perfectibilities, especially among beings capable of communicating to each other their acquisitions, does not afford a guarantee for collective perfectibility, we must renounce all philosophy and all moral and political science.

What constitutes man’s perfectibility is his intelligence, or the [p509] faculty which has been given to him of passing from error, which is the parent of evil, to truth, which is the generating principle of good.

It is science and experience which cause man to abandon, in his mind, error for truth, and afterwards, in his conduct, evil for good; it is the discovery which he makes, in phenomena and in acts, of effects which he had not suspected.

But to enable him to acquire this science, he must have an interest in acquiring it. In order that he should profit by this experience, he must have an interest in profiting by it. It is in the law of responsibility, then, that we must search for the means of realizing human perfectibility.

And as we can form no idea of responsibility apart from liberty; as acts which are not voluntary can afford neither instruction nor available experience; as beings capable of being improved or deteriorated by the exclusive action of external causes without the participation of choice, reflection, or free will (although this happens in the case of unconscious organized matter), could not be called perfectible, in the moral acceptation of the word, we must conclude that liberty is the very essence of progress. To impair man’s liberty is not only to hurt and degrade him; it is to change his nature; it is (in the measure and proportion in which such oppression is exercised) to render him incapable of improvement; it is to despoil him of his resemblance to the Creator; it is to dim and deaden in his noble nature that vital spark which glowed there from the beginning.

But in thus proclaiming aloud our fixed and unalterable belief in human perfectibility, and in progress, which is necessary in every sense, and which, by a marvellous correspondence, is as much more active in one direction as it is more active in all others, we must not be regarded as indulging in Utopianism, or be considered as optimists, believing “all to be for the best, in the best of worlds,” and expecting the immediate arrival of the millennium.

Alas! when we turn our regards on the world as it is, and see around us the enormous amount of mud and meanness, suffering and complaint, vice and crime, which still exist,—when we reflect on the moral action exerted on society by the classes who ought to point out to the lagging multitude the way to the New Jerusalem,—when we ask ourselves what use the rich make of their fortune, the poets of their genius, philosophers of their scientific lucubrations, journalists of the ministry with which they are invested, high functionaries, ministers of state, representatives of the people, kings, of the power which fate has placed in their hands,—when [p510] we witness revolutions like that which has recently agitated Europe, and in which each man seems to be in search of what must in the long-run prove fatal to himself and to society at large,—when we see cupidity in all shapes and among all ranks, the constant sacrifice of the interests of others to our own selfish interest, and of the future to the present,—when we see that great and inevitable moving spring of the human race, personal interest, still making its appearance only in manifestations the most material and the most improvident,—when we see the working classes, preyed upon by the parasitism of public functionaries, rise up in revolutionary convulsions, not against this withering parasitism, but against wealth legitimately acquired, that is to say, against the very element of their own deliverance and the principle of their own right and force,—when such spectacles present themselves to us on all sides, we get afraid of ourselves, we tremble for our faith in human perfectibility, the light would seem to waver, and be on the eve of extinction, leaving us in the fearful darkness of Pessimism.

But no—there is no ground for despair. Whatever be the impressions which too recent circumstances have made upon us, humanity still moves onward. What causes the illusion is that we measure the life of nations by the short span of our own individual lives; and because a few years are a long period for us, we imagine them also a long period for them. But even adopting this inadequate measure, the progress of society on all sides is visible. I need scarcely remind you of the marvels which have already been accomplished in what concerns material advantages, the improved salubrity of towns, and in the means of locomotion and communication, etc.

In a political point of view, has the French nation gained no experience? Who dares affirm that had all the difficulties through which we have just passed presented themselves half a century ago, or sooner, France would have overcome them with as much ability, prudence, and wisdom, and with so few sacrifices? I write these lines in a country which has been fertile in revolutions. Florence used to have a rising every five years, and at each rising one-half of her citizens robbed and murdered the other half. Had we only a little more imagination—not that which creates, invents, and assumes facts, but that which recalls them and brings them to mind—we should be more just to our times and to our contemporaries! What remains true, and it is a truth which no one can know better than an Economist, is this, that human progress, especially in its dawn, is excessively slow, so very slow as to give rise to despair in the heart of the philanthropist..... [p511]

Men whose genius invests them with the power of the press ought, it seems to me, to regard things more nearly, before scattering amidst the social fermentation discouraging speculations which imply for humanity the alternative of two modes of degradation.

We have already seen some examples of this, when treating of population, of rent, of machinery, of the division of inheritance, etc.

Here is another, taken from M. de ChÂteaubriand, who merely formulates a fashionable conventionalism: “The corruption of morals and the civilisation of nations march abreast. If the last present means of liberty, the first is an inexhaustible source of slavery.”

It is beyond doubt that civilisation presents means of liberty, and it is equally beyond doubt that corruption is a source of slavery. That which is doubtful, more than doubtful,—and what for my own part I deny solemnly and formally,—is this, that civilisation and corruption march abreast. If it were so, a fatal equilibrium would be established between the means of liberty and the sources of slavery; and immobility would be the fate of the human race.

There cannot, moreover, enter into the human heart a thought more melancholy, more discouraging, more desolating, a thought more fitted to urge us to despair, to irreligion, to impiety, to blasphemy, than this, that every human being, whether he wills it or not, whether he doubts it or not, proceeds on the road of civilisation—and civilisation is corruption!

Then, if all civilisation be corruption, wherein consist its advantages? It is impossible to pretend that civilisation is unattended with moral, intellectual, and material advantages, for then it would cease to be civilisation. As ChÂteaubriand employs the term, civilisation signifies material progress, an increase of population, of wealth, of prosperity, the development of intelligence, the advancement of the sciences; and all these steps of progress imply, according to him, a corresponding retrogression of the moral sense.

This were enough to tempt men to a wholesale suicide; for I repeat that material and intellectual progress is not of our preparation and ordination. God himself has decreed it, in giving us expansible desires and improvable faculties. We are urged on to it without wishing it, without knowing it,—ChÂteaubriand, and his equals, if he has any, more than any one else. And this progress is to sink us deeper and deeper into immorality and slavery, by means of corruption....... [p512]

I thought at first that ChÂteaubriand had let slip an unguarded phrase, as poets frequently do, without examining it too narrowly. With that class of writers, sound sometimes runs away with sense. Provided the antithesis is symmetrical, what matters it that the thought be false or objectionable? Provided the metaphor produces its intended effect, that it has an air of inspiration and depth, that it secures the applause of the public, and enables the author to pass for an oracle, of what importance are exactitude and truth?

I had thought, then, that ChÂteaubriand, giving way to a momentary excess of misanthropy, had allowed himself to formulate a conventionalism, a vulgarism dragged from the kennel. “Civilisation and corruption march abreast,” is a phrase that has been repeated since the days of Heraclitus, but it is not more true on that account.

At a distance of several years, however, the same great writer has reproduced the same thought, and in a more didactic form; which shows that it expressed his deliberate opinion. It is proper to combat it, not because it comes from ChÂteaubriand, but because it has got abroad, and so generally prevails.

“The material condition is ameliorated,” he says, “intellectual progress advances, and nations, in place of profiting, decay. Here is the explanation of the decay of society and the growth of the individual. Had the moral sense been developed in proportion to the development of intelligence, there would have been a counter weight, and the human race would have grown greater without danger. But it is just the contrary which happens. The perception of good and evil is obscured in proportion as intelligence is enlightened; conscience becomes narrowed in proportion as ideas are enlarged.”—MÉmoires d’Outre-Tombe, vol. xi. [p513]